We offer a variety of curriculum planning packages strategically organized around the use of student engagement in explanatory modeling activities to foster the use of higher-order cognitive skills to think critically about scientific psychology.
Check out the curriculum planning packages below for a structured teaching curriculum that fits your budget, teaching style, student characteristics, and course and departmental needs.
ALL OUR PACKAGES INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:
Introducing Students to Explanatory Modeling Activities (EMAs)
This feature includes advice on explaining to students what explanatory modeling is and how they can benefit from engagement in these activities.
Ema Engagement
This feature includes advice on developing tasks that can enhance students’ scientific understanding in core topics, integrating engagement in these tasks with teaching methods and instructional resources. We help teachers develop task that resemble the following:
The typical explanatory modeling task
Students are presented with a description of a psychological phenomenon (like a learned response to a configuration of stimuli or the memory of an event) and asked to engage in the following activities:
- Construct an explanation of that phenomenon in accordance with the explanatory practices of a given framework in psychology, like behavioral cognitive, or physiological.
- Model that explanation as a set of diagrams that capture the pattern of changes produced by causal interactions between those variables that give rise to the phenomenon to be explained.
- Use the causal relations captured by the set of diagrams to derive hypotheses about the potential effects of other variables that could alter the manifestations of the phenomenon to be explained.
- Design experiments to empirically evaluate these hypotheses.
Students’ performance on these tasks might be evaluated per the following criteria:
- Does the set of diagrams accurately represent those changes produced by interactions between causal variables that contribute to the target phenomenon?
- Is the model consistent with well-established, relevant domain knowledge?
- Does the model make only those assumptions that are necessary to account for the explanandum phenomenon?
- Do the experimental designs adequately control for and/or randomize all possible changes in the explanandum phenomenon other than those intended by the researcher?
